The Challenge of Post-Zionism

In uttering “Everywhere I wander is Jerusalem,” the late nineteenth-centuryHasidic revolutionary, Nahman of Bratzlav, was the first post-Zionist.The thought-provoking essays in this anthology, especially the conclusion,address the shifting signification of post-Zionism from (1) a methodologyin the Israeli social sciences, (2) to the political trends within contemporary Israeli society, and (3) to a particular period/project of the Israeli polity/society (p. 183).Rounding out the volume are the 1998 reflections of renownedPalestinian thinker, Edward Said, “New History, Old Ideas” (pp. 199-202).This is his critique of a Palestinian-Israeli conference featuring “new” Israelihistorians and their Palestinian counterparts, which included Elie Sambar,Nur Masalha, and himself, as well as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, ItamarRabinowitch, and Zeev Sternhell.The present anthology is born from Said’s critique of those who concludedthat it was morally wrong but necessary to expel the Palestinians intandem with Zionist efforts to reestablish the Jewish state. Of this group,only Pappé resists the profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia(p. 200), that informs all other research of these “new” historians. Callingfor Palestinian and Arab intellectuals to engage Israeli academic and intellectualaudiences by lecturing in Israeli centers openly, while admitting thatthe years of boycotting have achieved little (p. 202), Said calls for a newpolitics free of racial prejudices and ostrich-like attitudes. These seminalreflections are misplaced as an appendix, rather than as a forward.Following Hanna Herzog’s call for a post-Zionist discourse more informedby the clarity of feminism, it is a loss that the voice of Said’s daughter,Najla, is absent. Her significant involvement with the non-violent, democraticparty, the Palestinian National Initiative, would have been anotherwelcome voice in this discourse ...